Parliamentary Labour reminds me of the DNC, except without the likeability or competence.
Best commentary of the Blairites in Parliament that I have heard in a very long time.
Category: Politics
Tweet of the Day
The anti-Trump surprise candidate is a former CIA agent and Goldman Sachs guy who does TED talks, he’s going to take votes away from HIllary— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) August 8, 2016
Seriously, for all the big deal that people are making about his candidacy today, it’s about as useful as tits on a bull.
Note also that Evan McMullin has already dropped his time with the Vampire Squid from his online resume ……… Like that’s gonna make a difference.
H/t naked capitalism
David Sirota Collects Another Scalp
Last month David Sirota’s reporting revealed conflicts of interest in the review of the merger between Anthem and Cigna, resulting in regulatory and political push-back against the deal.
This month, his reporting of Chris Christie’s sweet heart deals with political contributor hedge funds has led to the New Jersey pensions backing away from the deals:
Governor Chris Christie’s pension officials on Wednesday signed off on a major divestment of hedge funds — a move that is expected to save taxpayers and retirees tens of millions of dollars in fees that had been flowing to Wall Street. The decision caps an intensifying campaign against the hedge fund investments by groups representing retirees.
The campaign was prompted by an International Business Times investigative series that first spotlighted the skyrocketing fees.
At a meeting of the Christie-controlled State Investment Council, pension officials cut in half the amount of state pension money that will be allocated to hedge funds, according to a press release from the New Jersey state AFL-CIO. That $3 billion reduction was part of an overall reduction of pension investments in higher-risk “alternative investments” that generate big fees, but whose returns have in many cases failed to keep pace with low-fee stock index funds. In all, the reduction in hedge fund investments is expected to save more than $120 million in fees next year, according to the labor federation, whose retiree members rely on the pension system.
………
After a decade of public pensions pumping more retiree money into alternative investments, new questions have recently been raised about the fees and returns generated by the strategy. Major pension funds in California and New York have reduced their investments in hedge funds.
Back in 2014, before the national debate over pension fees had intensified, IBT first began reporting on how Christie’s administration had significantly increased the amount of pension money flowing to high-fee alternative investment firms. The two-pronged year-long series explored the politics of pension investments as well as the revenue implications of the investment shift.
Under Christie, pension investments flowed to politically connected firms whose employees had delivered campaign donations to Christie-linked political groups. IBT also documented how Christie’s political team was in contact with the governor’s top pension adviser. That adviser’s private firm concurrently invested in a fund he had directed public pension money into. The adviser subsequently resigned after the state’s largest labor federation filed an ethics complaint against him.
So, these Gaultian supermen on Wall Street have once again been proved to be, “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers.”
We need to shut down this sort of unproductive rent seeking.
I Really Hope That They Stream This Online
We now know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is concerned about the primary later this month, because has just agreed to debate Tim Canova:
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Thursday she would debate her primary challenger Tim Canova.
“I have always said that when we got to August that I would focus on the question of whether or not I was going to debate my opponent,” she said in a brief telephone interview. “I am going to debate my opponent.”
Canova’s campaign treated the development like a victory. “It’s good news for the residents of South Florida,” Canova said. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never had to account for her record. She’s never engaged in a debate as long as she’s been a member of Congress. And it’s well past time to have that accounting.”
If you are comfortably in the lead, you pretend as if your opponent does not exist.
She is agreeing to debate because she expects the primary to be close.
I’ll post updates about when and where the debates will be, but in the meantime, throw some money at Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page which is currently set up to split contributions between Tim Canova and Alan Grayson, who is running for Florida Senate against former Republican, serial fabulist, and Wall Street BFF Patrick Murphy.
This is Some Well Done, and Well Deserved, Trolling
Following repeated cuts to the Missouri Public Defender’s office by the Missouri Governor, which has led the state to have the 49th most underfunded office in the nation, the head of the Public Defender’s office has invoked a section of state law to assign the Governor as a defense attorney for an indigent defendant.
It’s a “No Saving Throw” kind of thing under state law:
Fed up with what he says is the governor’s failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state’s lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month.
Michael Barrett said he was using a provision of state law that allows him in extraordinary circumstances to delegate legal representation “to any member of the state bar of Missouri.” He’s starting with the state’s highest-profile lawyer: Nixon.
Barrett says the governor has repeatedly declined to give the public defender system the money it requests and is withholding promised funding increases this year.
“Providing counsel to poor people who face incarceration is the obligation of the state. It’s not fair to go after private attorneys who are trying to pay the rent when they had nothing to do with contributing to this,” Barrett said in an interview Wednesday.
Barrett never exercised this power before because he thought it was wrong to place the burden of public cases on private attorneys “who have in no way contributed to the current crisis,” he wrote in a letter to the governor dated Tuesday.
“However, given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it,” Barrett wrote, referring to Nixon, a Democrat who was a four-term attorney general before becoming governor.
………
The Missouri constitution allows the director of the public defender system to assign cases to any lawyer in the state, regardless of whether the lawyer is a public defender, Barrett said.
Just this June, the legislature granted the public defender system a $4.5 million increase, which would’ve helped in hiring 10 more employees and some private attorneys on a contractual basis. The office currently employs more than 370 attorneys. Officials with the public defender’s office had asked for a $23.1 million boost, while Nixon recommended a $1 million increase.
Last month, Barrett and the Missouri State Public Defender Commission filed a lawsuit claiming that Nixon withheld $3.5 million of that $4.5 million increase. Barrett claims Nixon is targeting the public defender system for budget cuts while leaving more money for other programs he likes.
Rather unsurprisingly, the Governor is claiming that this assignment isn’t legal, but the law is pretty explicit here: the head of the Public Defender’s office can involuntarily appoint a bar member as counsel for an indigent defendant.
It’s gotten to the point where the US Department of Justice has expressed concerns that the state is violating defendants’ civil rights, and the governor keeps trying to gut the office.
Nixon deserves what’s happened to him.
NLRB Rules That Temps Can Unionize by Workplace
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has permatemps employed by outside employee leasing firms can organize by workplace, which means that business will no longer be able to sabotage unionization efforts by splitting their worker among outside firms:
The National Labor Relations Board is reaffirming its view that labor law must now address the brave new world of the fissured workplace—where workers are often separated from their actual employer by layers of subcontractors and staffing agencies. On Monday, the board announced a decision on the case Miller & Anderson, ruling that unions that want to represent bargaining units including direct employees as well as “permatemps,” contract workers, and other indirect workers that share a “community of interest” are no longer required to get permission from the parent company.
The old standard, established by George W. Bush’s NLRB in 2004, which required unions to gain such parent-employer consent, allowed companies to use staffing agencies and subcontractors as a barrier to organizing drives. Under the new ruling, a nurses union, for example, can now more readily expand bargaining units at a hospital to include registered nurses who are directly employed by the hospital, as well as nurses who work for staffing agencies hired by the hospital.
In an increasingly fractured world of labor relations, it’s hard to understate how big of a deal this is for easing union organizing efforts. And coming less than a year after its Browning Ferris ruling that established a bold new standard for defining when parent companies are joint employers of subcontracted workers, the Miller & Anderson decision is yet another important step that increases employer accountability to their workers by expanding the responsibilities of joint employers.
I’m stoked.
Brownback’s Folly
Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016
Well, Boehner is happy
Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:
A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.
Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.
“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.
Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.
The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.
Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.
As you can see, it did not work.
BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.
Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.
I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.
Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.
Not a Surprise………
Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee are now former officials of the DNC:
Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee will leave their posts this week amid the controversy over the release of a cache of hacked emails from the committee.
Chief executive Amy Dacey, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda will leave the DNC just days after a new leader took the helm.
A trove of nearly 20,000 emails were posted on WikiLeaks last month. They included some emails that raised questions about the faith of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and others that seemed to disparage donors.
This is not a surprise.
Dacey and Marshall had the now infamous email exchange about targeting Sanders on his religion, and Miranda was hired by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and functioned primarily her personal publicist.
The organization needs to be fixed, and this will mean more than just getting rid of DWS toadies at the organization.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
In a fit of political pandering, Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order banning sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go while declining a law intended to facilitate prosecution of child rape into law:
Governor Anthony Cuomo, never afraid to take quick and decisive action on the issues facing New York, announced today that all 3,000 of New York’s sex offenders will be prohibited from “downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any internet-enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon Go.”
“Protecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims,” said Cuomo in a statement. “These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children.”
To that end, Cuomo will have the Division of Criminal Justice Services provide a current list of sexual offenders to Niantic Inc., the creator of Pokémon Go, as well providing the same list to Apple and Google. Parole officers will also be trained in how to check and see whether their parolees have been playing any internet-enabled games.
………
Meanwhile, left sitting on Cuomo’s desk at the end of this year’s legislative session was a bill that would have lengthened the statute of limitations on sexual-abuse cases by five years; given officials a six-month window to revisit old cases; and eliminated the difference in how public and private organizations (i.e., the Catholic Church) would be treated when it comes to child-sexual-abuse cases.
The cause of this? A grandstanding state senator who found that some Pokeman were located within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.
You can find anything within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.
The stupid, it burns.
Nope. No Racism Here
In Sparta, Georgia the the board of elections is sending cops to issue summons to black voters demanding that they show present themselves at their office to justify their right to vote:
When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.
But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.
The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”
The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.
“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”
The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.
………
But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.
Clearly the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act was premature, but it was a corrupt and blatantly political ruling, so this is no surprise.
What About the Higher Ups?
6 low level employees have been charged for allegedly falsifying reports in the Flint, Michigan lead tainted water crisis:
A special investigator for the Michigan Attorney General’s office said six state employees who were criminally charged today hid and manipulated data last summer that showed a change in drinking-water sources was poisoning people here.
Liane Shekter-Smith, Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook worked for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality; and Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller and Robert Scott worked for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services last summer and are charged in the case filed this morning in Flint District court.
………
The Health and Human Services employees “effectively buried” research indicating high lead levels in children’s blood from July through September 2014 could be connected to the switch in water sources and needed further research, Seipenko said.The epidemiologist researching the tests wasn’t yet finished with her report when Peeler and Scott “worked together to produce a graph of elevated blood levels without applying any statistical method. Peeler, relying on this unscientific graph, drafted and sent (an) unfounded email to MDHHS management (that) inappropriately concluded that the switch of water sources was not the cause of elevated blood levels within the children,” Seipenko said.
Peeler was manager of the Early Childhood Health section of MDHHS, and Scott is acting coordinator and data manager for the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention program at the MDHHS. Miller was director of the Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention at MDHHS, Seipenko said.
………
Smith faces charges of misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Cook is charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to engage in misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Rosenthal is charged with misconduct office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence or engage in misconduct in office, and tampering with evidence as a public officer engaged in a willful neglect of his duty.Peeler, Miller and Scott are charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty.
These do not appear to particularly high level employees.
Ignoring these results was clearly a directive made at a more senior level, probably at the level of Governor Rick Snyder’s cabinet, but I see no evidence of a higher level investigation so far.
It’s pretty clear that his office had to be involved in authorizing the cover up.
So Not a Surprise
Research has found that gun fondling (the ammosexual life style) is closely associated with bigoted attitudes:
In America, support for some gun control policies, such as universal background checks, is above 90% percent, and yet mass shooting after mass shooting fails to incite action from politicians.
The popular explanation for this failure to act, so well evoked by commentators like Igor Volsky, is that the NRA has bought and paid for many politicians, who refuse to vote against their paymasters to support common sense gun control measures. And it’s true that the NRA has used its leverage and war chest to apply pressure to politicians and beat back gun control efforts
However, this NRA-centric narrative is inadequate to explain why efforts to control America’s gun violence epidemic keep failing.
Recently, we analyzed two separate data sources about Americans’ attitudes toward guns and gun control, and found that there is major, less-examined factor that influences the gun control debate: the racial identity and racial attitudes of gun owners, and those who support or oppose gun control legislation.
Put simply, America’s gun problem is a white supremacy problem in disguise.
This is not a surprise.
The modern history of gun control begins with restrictive gun legislation signed into law in California in the 1960s by Ronald Reagan.
It was in response to the open carry activism of the Black Panthers, which culminated with them walking into the state legislature packing heat.
The rather tepid Gun Control Act of 1968, followed California’s law, and this, along with white panic over the perceived threat of Black radicals led to the NRA going batsh%$ insane, and now we have a significant portion of our political process driven by the paranoid ammosexual movement.
Debbie Wasserman Thrown Under Bus
This Politico article is as nasty a hit job I’ve seen on anyone in the media,
Among other revelations:
- Ignoring a DNC fund raising need to raise funds for her own campaign from Joe Biden.
- She also ignored another DNC need at the same meeting to ask Biden to show up to her daughter’s bat Mitzvah.
- Described her as, “An increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions..”
- Hassled Obama staffers seats at an event, allegedly for her big donors, and then gave those seats to her family.
Read the rest: It’s brutal.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz may very well be more loathed by her fellow party members than Ted Cruz is loathed by his.
I cannot help but think that they actually want her to lose the primary to Tim Canova this August.
h/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
This is an Insanely Good Idea
Jeremy Corbyn has proposed that the Labour party set up a fund to allow people of little means run for parliament:
The Labour party should set up a fund to help people on low incomes become MPs, the frontrunner for the party’s leadership has said.
Jeremy Corbyn said Labour’s members of parliament needed to be drawn from people who were facing the brunt of government policy so that they would understand what was at stake.
The diversity fund would help party members in the top 100 target seats from working class backgrounds with selection costs, which the Corbyn campaign says can amount to as much as £4,500.
“If the party is to win back the five million predominantly working-class voters lost since 1997, then we must reflect those we seek to represent. It is not enough to be for working people – we have to be of working people as well,” the candidate argued.
“Because if at the next election we as a party have hardly any candidates from the frontline of Tory cuts then it will be very hard to be heard by voters we need to win back.
I think that this should be considered in the United States as well..
Who Needs Legal Ethics?
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are requesting that the organization’s “White Shoe” law firm, Perkins Coie, be removed from the case for gross conflicts of interest:
A high profile law firm is now caught up in the DNC WikiLeaks mess. A group of Bernie Sanders supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, and the now-former chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz. In a letter sent Monday, they are demanding that attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP be removed from the case due to a conflict of interest. New emails discovered through the WikiLeaks dump show that attorneys from the law firm have given strategy advice to hurt Sanders, well before he dropped out. To add fuel to their claim, they’ve now discovered that attorneys from Perkins Coie are representing both the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign.
………
Internal emails discovered through WikiLeaks show that Perkins Coie attorneys advised the DNC on how to fight allegations from Bernie Sanders. This spring, the Sanders campaign accused Hillary Clinton of ‘laundering’ money through the Clinton Victory Fund. Marc Elias, who serves as the Clinton campaign’s general counsel and also a partner at Perkins Coie, fired off an email to DNC staff stating:
My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the accusations the Sanders campaign are not true. The fact that CNN notes that you aren’t getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here, Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly on Trump over “rigged system”, the DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful the Democratic party. [emphasis added]
………
However, attorneys for Bernie Sanders supporters contend that the federal court rules bar Perkins Coie lawyers from representing the DNC as defense counsel in the case. They say that the Perkins Coie attorneys may become “potential material witnesses” or “defendants” in the case and should be disqualified. They plan to file an official motion in court.
Seriously, what is up with this?
Some of the partners, i.e. the bosses at the firms, are working for a political campaign, and are likely to be called as witnesses, and they are still representing the DNC?
This is f%$#ed up.
He’s just F%$#ing with Us Now
If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016
This is an epic troll
At a press conference, Donald Trump just called for Russia to hack Hillary’s emails:
Donald Trump appeared to incite Russia to hack into and publish Hillary Clinton’s private emails, as her campaign sounded “alarm” at growing evidence of a foreign power “interfering in an American election”.
………
Trump, meanwhile, speaking at a press conference in Florida, raised the stakes again, as he urged Russia to hack into and release Clinton’s emails from the personal server she used while she was secretary of state.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.
“I think you you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.”
The Republican nominee added: “They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted … I hope they do … because you’d see some beauties there.”
Trump has since stated that he was being sarcastic, which is no surprise.
Over the past week, we’ve seen what can only be described as a campaign of Red baiting by the Clinton campaign (seriously, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?), I would be inclined to be sarcastic as well:
Donald Trump says he was “being sarcastic” when he suggested Wednesday that Russia should find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
“Of course I’m being sarcastic. And they don’t even know frankly if it’s Russia,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade set to air in full Thursday morning.
Even by the standards of the the crazy season that is a Presidential campaign, this season is completely batsh%$ insane.
Ha Ha!
Notwithstanding the fact that the his Blairite opposition has settled on a single competitor to run against Jeremy Corbyn to head labour, but the current Labour leader still has a strong majority in polls:
Jeremy Corbyn is the overwhelming favourite to win the Labour leadership contest, according to the latest Opinium/Observer poll, which shows he has more than twice the level of support among party supporters as his challenger, Owen Smith.
The online poll finds that among those who say they back Labour, 54% support Corbyn against just 22% who would prefer Smith. Some 20% say they are undecided and 4% say they do not intend to vote.
The findings offer further proof that grassroots support for Corbyn remains firm despite weeks of bitter conflict between the leader and Labour MPs at Westminster, a large majority of whom backed a vote of no confidence in him after the EU referendum.
This is not a surprise.
What is also not a surprise is that Labour is not polling well, because they managed to appear more f%$#d up than the Tories, which is no small thing, considering that they just made Boris f%$#ing Johnson their foreign minister.
The Blairites are more than willing to destroy Labour to maintain their positions within the party.
My First Reaction was to Invoke the Wizard of Oz
Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned as head of the DNC:
The Democratic National Committee chairwoman resigned under fire Sunday, on the eve of a national convention meant to project competence and unity in contrast to the turbulence of the Republicans’ gathering last week.
The disarray threatened to upend Hillary Clinton’s plan to paint the Democrats as the party best prepared to lead a divided and anxious country and herself as the leader who can offer an optimistic alternative to Republican Donald Trump.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida was forced aside by the release of thousands of embarrassing emails among party officials that appeared to show coordinated efforts to help Clinton at the expense of her rivals in the Democratic primaries. That contradicted claims by the party and the Clinton campaign that the process was open and fair for her leading challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The news that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary is not really news, but the fact that we now have incontrovertible proof of it was unexpected.
She’s landed on her feet though, as the Clinton campaign has announced that she, “Will serve as honorary chair of her campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country.”
One thing that we can be certain of now is that DWS will never be the Speaker of the House.
I rather hope that this makes it more likely that Tim Canova defeats her in the primary.
Pelosi Comes Out Against TPP
I am inclined to believe that this not a change of heart, but rather political realities forcing her to do the right thing:
Today, EFF joined a broad coalition of other public interest groups at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco, to present her with a petition carrying an incredible 209,419 signatures with a request to oppose the introduction of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the post-election “lame duck” session of Congress. And with your help, we succeeded! In a letter that she handed us at our meeting, Leader Pelosi wrote:
As Congress and the American people review the finalized terms of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), we must put American workers first to allow our economy to grow and America to succeed. Please be assured that I will oppose the TPP as it is currently written or any deal that attempts to separate commerce from the environment and will work to ensure that our nation’s trade policies include increased transparency, more consultation, and stronger protections to create jobs, strengthen human rights, and preserve the environment.
Yes, I am rather cynical about this.
Least Surprising News out of the Republican National Convention
It turns out that the RNC was a bonanza for male prostitutes:
It’s been a great week for gay escorts in Cleveland.
Male prostitutes contacted by The Post said business is booming and Republican National Convention attendees — most of them married — are clamoring for their services.
“Business has been way better. I’ve seen 10 clients so far,” one male escort said.
“Most of them were first-timers. You could tell they were nervous, but once they became more comfortable, they seemed to be having a good time.”
Another escort said he had already earned $1,600 since Monday — over six times the amount he usually makes.
………
One gigolo who charges $250 an hour said he’s been making about $800 per day since the convention kicked off — all from men visiting from Florida, Louisiana and Washington, DC.
“Usually I need to go out of town,” he said with a chuckle.
Most men paid to have sex, but one client requested to “do his business in the corner” while watching his wife in bed with the escort.
………
“The Republicans have a lot of delegates in the closet, let’s put it that way.”
Party of family values my ass.
H/t Joe.My.God.